#imnotamodeling

About

#imnotamodeling is a Google+ hashtag associated with selfies that are presented as if they were accidentally candid shots taken by the subjects themselves.

Origin

On February 3rd, 2014, Google+ user Joe Lancaster shared a screenshot of a body selfie posted by one of his friends on Instagram, which featured a caption that read "Phone accidentally took a photo. Soooo not planned #awkward not really a #lornajane #model."

Precursors

Prior to this hashtag development on Google+, there have been a few parody photo fads of selfies shared under false description, most notably Carlene Burkhead's self-aware "i am not a model" photographs on Facebook and "bae caught me slippin" selfies on Instagram.

Spread

A few hours later, fellow Google+ user, Lillian Trease, thought it would be funny to mimic the shot and caption and post it to her Google+ stream. Joe Lancaster and fellow early adapter and Google+ user, Pavel G, thought it would be great to turn it into a thing, and so promptly also mimicked the shot and caption, tagging other users to kick off the trend and tagging it #imnotamodeling. In the following 48 hours, at least 400 unique instances of parody selfies were uploaded to Google+, all of them accompanied by the same caption and hashtags.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

[not yet available]

External References